Today is Black Friday but it is also Buy Nothing Day however, one should be prepared for the other 364 days when you can spend, without worrying about your conscience, therefore I present to you the, The Ars Technica Holiday Gift Guide.

This year they’ve conveniently divided it up into sections. Under the kitchen section for example, the first item is an Impressa E Espresso Machine, made by Jura-Capressoit it will set you back an astonishing $899 although, when it comes to the coffee fiend who shares your bed you should spare no expense.

Moving along the next section to catch my eye was the fitness section.

The first item on the list is the Gramin forerunner 310 GPS. It’s a special gadget made for runners. You strap it too your wrist like a watch. If you are a runner and feel the need for something to track how far, how fast and at what pace you are running you want this. It also comes with a heart rate monitor you strap around your chest so it can send data wirelessly to the GPS. The cheapest place to get this is at GPScity.ca or .com. For a cool $169.95 CAD you are saving $80 -$100 over the competition. Mine arrived in the mail two days ago. I will post a review in another week or two once I get on to it.

The best book I have read lately is called, The Help, written by Kathryn Stockett. I put it on my hold list at the library back in November. Five days ago I bought it home and stayed up way past my bedtime to finish reading it.

All the action in this story takes place in Jackson Mississippi from 1960-1964.

The story unfolds from the eyes of two black domestic workers, Aibileen and Minny, they spend their days cleaning up after white families, cooking their meals and raising their children.

Skeeter, a young white woman just returned from college, is struggling with the racial inequalities she sees all around her. As well, her mother would like her to be like her friends and settle down with a husband and kids. But Skeeter is desperate to become a writer.

The other day, while shopping, I got a craving for licorice allsorts, actually I’d been craving them for days, and decided to satisfy it right then. However, the only licorice allsorts I could find, came in a giant box, like the sort of box one might find under the Christmas tree. I briefly considered going to another store, hoping they would have something smaller because I don’t need a whole kilogram of licorice allsorts. But going to another store was not in my plan, so I thought, what the hey, and I bought them.

I managed to eat quite a few on the drive home. Feeling somewhat sick I hid them in the bottom of the freezer, forgetting all about them until today. So HELP ME, because now I’m forced to blog about my licorice allsorts self made addiction, in a supreme effort to take my mind away from eating every last one of them right now!

Anxious to get going with this wristwatch like GPS, designed for running, I took a hasty look at the quick-start-guide, strapped the Garmin too my wrist, put on my running gear and went outside.
The device took a couple of minutes, or less, to find a satellite. I pressed the start button and I was off.

What it keeps track off

You can keep track of useful things like how far you run, the time it takes you to do the run, your pace, your heart rate and not so useful things like how many calories you burn.

The GPS comes with software to program the Garmin for the type of run you want to do and the pace and heart rate zone you want to do it at. The software keeps track of all your runs and also comes with a set of prepackaged workouts.

You can also just program the Garmin.

Heart Rate Monitor

When I saw this I could almost taste its sour sweetness. I got an intense craving to make one for myself. I couldn’t find a recipe I liked so I ended up inventing my own.

I used lots of sweet butter, 4 lemons, 4 free range eggs, white sugar, white flour and cream. I made the crust in the usual way cutting the butter into the sugar and flour, adding just enough water to bring it together into a soft pastry. I rolled it out, put it into my pie dish and placed it in a hot oven to partially cook. I grated the rind off the lemons, squeezed out all their juice and beat them up with the eggs, sugar and cream. I took the partially cooked pie shell out of the oven, poured in the filling, turned the oven down to medium and put it back in.

I used to drive my car around my running route using its odometer to calculate the distance I was running. Since the distance I run varies and is also increasing in length every week using the cars odometer was sort of overkill, then I heard about runnersworld.com

If you join their site you can keep track of all kinds of running related things. The main thing, for me, was to be able to use google maps to calculate how far I was running. However, signing up on their site was a pain. When I finally succeeded I mapped my run by clicking my mouse at intervals along the road. It told me the total number of miles I had run. Mileage or should I say kilometrage is also available in kilometers which I prefer. I saved my map and logged out. Later, when I came back to the site to make another map, or rather gloat about the extra distance I was now running, the site refused to recognize me. It told me I did not exist, even though I entered my coordinates a couple a times, fearing typos. Humpf.

More than two years ago I packed all my books into boxes in preparation for moving. They sat in the basement of our new house until today. They withstood a flood when the connection in one of the water pipes blew apart luckily the plumber was still on contract so he fixed it the next day although he did nothing for the books.

The years the books spent in boxes compressed by other books in boxes was such that some of the paperbacks buckled and curled I hope they straighten out on the shelves.

most of our books
Having all my books in boxes was a pain. I was constantly being reminded of some book I wanted to get a quote from, or reread, or lend to a friend. I was forced too go down into the basement, rummage around in the boxes, in desperation throwing books aside trying to remember which book the particular author quote was in. The book I wanted to lend to a friend was always in the last box I looked in. Now they are all on shelves I’m looking forward to rearranging them, perhaps this time by author.

As usual we managed to fill two boxes with discards, books I know I will never read again. I only keep books I read more than once. I only try to buy books I think I want to read more than once. Sometimes I make a mistake.

So now I’ve moved back to the country my sources for locally produced food from the Peace have all but dried up; something to do with the new shortsighted rules for farm gate sales. I’ve started to look for food closer too home which is smart given our current world wide crisis (there are plenty to choose from)

My first thought was I would have to construct a fenced in hen house, buy a bunch of baby chicks for eggs as well as the cooking pot and maybe a DIY book to ease my new parent anxieties. I really was not looking forward to it even though I know, in a couple of years, the whole enterprise would pay me back, in the taste department as well as my pocket book. Then, I saw a sign on the community bulletin board for free range eggs, score.

I love this pattern. I bought it from Anna Bell the minute I saw it on her blog. In February I ordered, online, 5 skeins of Debbie Bliss cotton angora, enough to make the smallest size. There is only one local yarn store, LYS, in Prince George and they do not carry Debbie Bliss yarn.

After swatching I realized I had to go down a whole needle size to get gauge, not bad. As I knitted I learned how to make cables, her instructions are exhaustive. After finishing the back and both fronts I realized I needed more yarn if I were to finish both sleeves and sew all the pieces together. I had to get it from another online store. The shipping cost more than the one skein I ordered, but what was I to do?

Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal Vegetable Miracle, is about a families year long experiment to produce all their own food or buy whatever they couldn’t produce from local sources. Usually small farms like their own and farmers markets. Sometimes their definition of local had to be expanded to include their whole state or another country for food like coffee and tea produced under a Fair Trade agreement.

I enjoyed this book. It inspired me to want to really take up vegetable gardening in a big way, try and plant as much food as possible so as to avoid buying out of season produce at the supermarket. Because if you are eating right you will not be eating tomatoes from Mexico in February. With a freezer you would have been able to freeze your tomatoes in August, when they were ripe, for use in stews and soups all year long.

For a while I was almost convinced to buy some laying hens and a couple of roosters. Robert soon set me straight by pointing out how much of a hassle it would be finding someone to look after them when we wanted to go away.